The 9 Most Offensive 9/11 References In Pop Culture

Cracked.com recently came up with a list of the 9 most offensive 9/11 references in Pop culture.

The list features a variety of 9 different ads and videos which can be seen below.

#9 This is an ad for a French newsmagazine. The tagline is “Learn to anticipate.”

The visual seems to suggest that the easiest way to prevent 9/11 would have been to construct the WTC towers shorter. We shouldn’t have increased airport security, or paid more attention to our foreign intelligence, or maybe not trained and funded Osama bin Laden in the late 1970s; it all could have been avoided if we’d just quit at the 80th story.

What possible defense is there for this? “We, the French, were simply unaware that the planes were piloted by terrorists! We thought your planes just could not fly high enough to overcome your mighty buildings!”

This ad is clearly implying that, had the buildings been shorter, the terrorists would have simply continued their flights unabated, like they stole the planes in the first place only to fulfill their long-held dreams of attending flight school. We don’t want to make fun of all French people here, because this is just an isolated incident by a really stupid company, and also because we actually have a lot of respect for their military prowess and innovative whoremongering.

#8 WWF Sets Off 9/11 Times 100

The WWF (the World Wildlife Fund, though we will never read that and not think of wrestling) likes to point out that the 2004 Asian tsunami killed 100 times as many people as 9/11 did. And apparently it likes to do so with all the tact and dignity of a professional wrestler whose entire gimmick was eating children. The WWF suggests that we should respect nature more, which we guess seems reasonable. But it concludes that, in this particular case, the best way to respect nature is by donating money to save panda bears from extinction — despite the fact that nature has expressed in no uncertain terms that it wants pandas dead like yesterday.

And at no point does th WWF’s panda-saving initiative connect the tsunami to 9/11, planes, cities or indeed, any single aspect of this ad. It’s like somebody built a dartboard with all the major tragedies of the past couple centuries written on it, closed his eyes, threw the darts and then built a Photoshop image out of whatever terms he hit. We’re just lucky we didn’t end up with a poster of Princess Di’s corpse starting the Great Chicago Fire while they canceled Arrested Development in the background.